The word “socialism” appears steadily more often in steadily more places. Socialism praised, cursed, interred. Socialism past, future, resurrected. 

What is this thing called “socialism”? Opponents look backward to decry negative outcomes attributed to socialism: Regimentation. Inefficiency. Waste. Boredom. Authoritarianism. Advocates look forward to celebrate positive outcomes expected from socialism. Equity. People having a fair say over what affects their lives. Abundant health care, education, and housing. Munificent redistribution, dignity, and peace. 

The positives are nice, but do people who expect positive results advocate institutions that would yield those positive results without offsetting negative results? Read poll results, speeches, interviews, celebrations, essays, and even books that feature the word “socialism.” You encounter envisioned positive outcomes but do you encounter descriptions of institutions that will nurture and sustain those outcomes? Is socialism just changed policies, or even just a desire for changed policies? Or is socialism a shared institutional destination? 

Find someone who says they identify as a socialist. Ask “what is socialism?” Hear the answer. Is there institutional clarity? Are there even institutions at all? Read books with socialism in their title. Take your time. Based on what you read could you describe the institutions of a proposed alternative economy? Did what you read explain what socialism’s new division of labor would be? What its new approach to making decisions would be? What its new approach to determining how much income actors receive would be? What its new way to allocate inputs to workplaces and outputs from workplaces to consumers or other workplaces would be? Did it explain how the new system would sensibly affect the ecology? Why the new system’s institutions would yield the author’s desired results, and why the new institutions would eliminate oppression and alienation? Did the authors demonstrate how socialism’s institutions would transcend class division and class rule? How they would yield no bosses and not new bosses? 

I worry that socialism has become unmoored from proposing new defining institutions. Is that unfair? If Its advocates believe socialism is the institutions that yield their desired outcomes can you report what they say are socialism’s defining institutions? And report how they say those institutions would work? How they will deliver the desirable outcomes that advocates desire and not the horrible ills that critics rail at? Why they will be viable? Why they will last? 

In an influential 1963 pamphlet titled “The Two Souls of Socialism,” the Marxist historian, Hal Draper, said that “socialism” conveys three meanings. First, dictatorial political regimes plus central planning for allocation plus corporate workplace organization. Second, using government intervention to ameliorate damage caused by core capitalist structures. And third, classlessness, wherein all workers and consumers have appropriate participation and decision making influence regarding their economic lives, rather than many people being subordinate to a few.

For Draper, a primary issue was also whether one’s strategy was “from above“ or “from “below,” and not solely the character of the analysis that precedes one’s strategy or of the goal that it seeks. However, if we don’t pay close attention to underlying concepts and overarching goals, how can we accurately judge whether a strategy is “from above” or “from below”?

Draper wanted a “true socialism” and felt any effort to attain it would need strategic commitments that would melt into a new participatory and self-managing system. If an effort to attain liberation instead established a new ruling economic class and an authoritarian state, then its having espoused delightful daily life goals would have been necessary but not sufficient. In other words, the proof is in the pudding and Draper warned that regardless of our hopes, if our means are “from above” we will wind up with authoritarian pudding. If our methods intrinsically foster authoritarianism—in economics, in politics, in other domains—then our outcomes will be authoritarian. It was almost a truism. You reap what you sow. And yet, in 1963 it needed to be said, and once said it revealed that a central task is to realize what methods generate authoritarian outcomes and what methods instead generate liberatory ones.

What if we think our methods are in tune with our aspirations “from below,” and we pursue them, and we wind up with authoritarian results anyhow? We thought our actions accorded with our aims. It turned out they didn’t. Our judgment wasn’t as good as we thought. 

Or what if we have quite liberatory means, as best we can see, but nonetheless, as we make progress against corporations, the market, and the state, the only options we can conceive for organizing a new economy take us away from our intended path and toward new hierarchies? In that case too, we would have favored good strategic means that we thought wouldn’t subvert our aspirations, yet we would have wound up with bad ends anyhow. 

It follows that it isn’t enough to say we have to fight “from below” rather than to fight “from above”—that we have to fight with methods and organization that lead to truly liberated outcomes rather than with methods and organizations that lead to new forms of political and class domination. No, we have to additionally say what that instruction actually means. And it isn’t even enough that we know what the instruction means and abide it, if it turns out that as we make progress we have no idea what forms to construct consistent with our desires, so we fall back into old ways or adopt new ways that despite our best intentions subvert our desires.

Draper says “the heart of socialism from below is its view that socialism can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands, mobilized ‘from below’ in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors … on the stage of history.”

Okay, that sounds very smart, but in the earliest stages of activity some few people will be very aroused and aware, huge numbers of other people will be less so, and still more people will not be politically conscious and active at all. The aroused few will act. They will take initiative. And yet they must not end up dominating those who only later become involved. How is that to happen? 

To say change must be sought from below and not from above leaves the task of implementing actual structures consistent with the instruction. What’s more, as the initial organizing of small numbers of people inspires many others to become involved, and then more and more people to become involved, and as the growing numbers of activists begin to manifest their preferences to win changes that improve their lives and all lives, and as they eventually gain sufficient weight to take over workplaces and communities and to establish local organs of direct power ”from below,” will this inevitably equate to a new world with truly participatory self managed features? 

It may, of course, and indeed, it is necessary, as Draper rightly urges. But is it sufficient? What if the “from below” project preserves markets and slowly but surely markets erode the euphoria of struggle and impose a new class rule? Or what if the “from below” project preserves the old 1st corporate division of labor because no other option is attempted, and that subverts peoples’ desirable intentions? 

In other words, does it follow that if a movement internally structures itself without undo hierarchies of power and income, a new society built by that movement will preserve and extend those properties? A movement “from below” is a necessary condition to win a classless new economy, yes, but is it sufficient?

Said differently, does it matter that Karl Marx or Hal Draper says he wants the self-directed emancipation of workers any more than it matters that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or anyone else says they want a maximum of liberty, justice, and equity for all? Isn’t what really matters whether the frameworks of thought, choices of actions, and especially the programs they implement, advance or deny their proclaimed aims. And isn’t this true whether it happens by error or by overt personal intention? And so aren’t we back to our initial question. Socialism, what is it?

Most actors, by and large, say they want nice ends. If we quote Marx saying he wants nice ends to prove that after all Marxism is about attaining nice ends, why not also quote Lenin, Trotsky, or even Stalin describing the nice ends they desire, to prove that Leninism, Trotskyism, or even Stalinism are about attaining nice ends? Why not just look at Clinton, Biden, or Trump describing nice ends, not at their actions, to claim Clintonism, Bidenism or Trumpism are about attaining nice ends? 

Draper doesn’t praise Marxist Leninist actors beyond Marx because he feels there is a schism between what those actors said they wanted, which they sometimes trumpeted in undeniably nice slogans, and what those actor’s movements actually did in real history. The important evidence, Draper knows, is not self description`, but the concepts utilized and the structures implemented. 

So if Draper wanted to look at Marx—or more importantly for his day, back in 1963 or for now in 2026, at Marxism—or at Anarchism, Leninism, or what have you—he ought to look at such matters as their basic concepts and methods and not only at their most inspiring phrases. This, by the way, is exactly what Marx would advise.

Marx (and others) provided Lenin and all who followed him an intellectual framework of concepts for thinking about social change. In a great many respects that framework was incredibly powerful. No sensible person can reasonably deny that. But does the set of concepts that were handed on have some problems that can interfere with discerning what is “a movement from above” as compared to what is “a movement from below”?

Did the roots of Bolshevik movements being “from above,” derive only from deviant choices of Lenin, Trotsky, and later Stalin? Was being “from above” imposed on Marxism by infidel “Marxists” who deviated from Marxism’s inner logic or did some attributes at the heart of Marxism’s concepts not only fail to eliminate inclinations to organize “from above,” but even propel organizing “from above” against activists’ better personal inclinations? Similarly, are there flaws in the vision and analysis that has most often been called “socialism” that have elevated structures at odds with liberatory aspirations even by movements that strive to be “from below”? 

The Polish Solidarity movement, Solidarnosc, begun in 1980 was bottom-up oriented during its uprisings. Solidarnosc explicitly sought workers self management. The folks who moved first were explicitly committed to being a catalyst and to never ruling. Yet when the dust cleared there was elite rule by a few, and in particular by those who had moved first.

For the rest of this essay, I’d like to explore two extensions of the “from below” instruction which I think are in tune with Draper’s intent, though they extend beyond what Draper had to say. First is that Marxist class analysis has a flaw that has contributed to why all economies that have been guided by Marxism have not, in fact, eliminated classes. 

Second, is a succinct picture of what Draper might like to call “real socialism,” which I call “participatory economics” and some call “participatory socialism.” I want to offer it as a goal worth striving for that along with our movements needing to be “from below,” can protect our movements from re-imposing class stratified economic relations.

Marxism’s virtues include that it powerfully explains ownership relations and profit-seeking. It reveals the horrible effects of markets. It highlights class dynamics. But are there also conceptual flaws we need to transcend? In particular, does Marxism have flaws that contribute to so many Marxists finding themselves categorized by Draper as being in the “from above” camp?

Marxism has some problems that are serious but not directly relevant to Draper’s highlighted dichotomy. For example, Marxist dialectics are a methodological reminder to think holistically and historically that often, however, by its obscurity drains creativity and range of perception. That is, when “real existing people” in 1963, when Draper wrote, (and now too) utilize “historical materialist” concepts they often under-value and mis-understand social relations of gender, political, cultural, and ecological origin and import. Marxism as used by real practitioners often so exaggerates the centrality of economics as to give insufficient attention to gender, race, polity, and the environment. To fully overcome this “economism” of the Marxism prevalent in Draper’s day would require a twofold alteration of how some Marxists constructed and utilized their world view. They would need to acknowledge that Marxism mainly conceptualized economics, and they would need to recognize that conceptualizations of the other mentioned realms offer equally central insights and moreover that influences from those other domains can centrally contour economic relations, just as economic forces can influence those other domains. But Draper himself in the early sixties, and a half century later now too most Marxists have little problem with making the above admissions and often offer them on their own, no prodding needed.

That is, most (though not all) Marxists have by now jettisoned the orthodox base/superstructure conceptualization to instead highlight that gender, race, and political dynamics can impact economics just as powerfully as vice versa. Modern Marxism at its best recognizes both directions of causality, not exclusively causality from economics to the rest of society. These recognitions have propelled feminists to create socialist feminism (to merge insights from gender-focused and from class-focused analyses), and has led as well to variants of anarcho-Marxism, Marxist nationalism, and the idea of racialized capitalism—right up to frameworks that centrally and intersectionally address economics, polity, culture, kinship, and ecology all on a par and interactively. 

So far so good, but the at least in part transcended concerns about economism are not the problem of Marxism that I wish to explore here. They are not the problem that I think is most central to many Marxists ultimately winding up, even against their own desires, on the “from above” side of Draper’s typology so that they favor a variant on Draper’s first (Bolshevik) or second (Social Democratic) type of socialism, but not the third (classless) type.

Indeed, suppose most Marxists have over the last few decades achieved an intersectional enrichment and diversification of their concepts. Should activists be satisfied with such a desirably renovated now multi focal Marxism?

I believe we should be happy about those gains, yes, but no, I don’t think we should be satisfied with them because I think Marxism has a more troubling and less tractable second problem. Ironically, the second problem is that Marxism gets the economy wrong. For example, in almost all its texts the Labor Theory of Value misunderstands the determination of wages, prices, and profits in capitalist economies and tends to turn activists’ thoughts away from seeing how the dynamics of the workplace and market are largely functions of bargaining power and social control, categories that the labor theory of value underplays. Likewise, orthodox Marxist crisis theory distorts understanding of capitalist economies and anti-capitalist prospects by often seeing intrinsic collapse where no such prospect exists and by often orienting activists away from the importance of their own organizing as a far more promising basis for constructive change. But these ills too, one can imagine Marxists fully transcending, as indeed, again, I think many and perhaps even most Marxists have already done over recent decades. Okay, so let’s also assume these ills are transcended.

What I want to focus on would still remain. It is that in virtually every variant of Marxism, even with all the above concerns transcended, there would remain that Marxist class theory most often denies and always at least distorts the existence of what I call the coordinator (and what some others call the professional-managerial or technocratic) class, and in particular underestimates and even ignores this third class’s specific class antagonisms with the working class below and with the capitalist class above.

This particular failing has long obstructed class analysis of Soviet, Eastern European, and Third World non-capitalist economies, and also of capitalism itself. And it is this flaw, I suggest, that leads much Marxist thinking and practice, even against rank and file activist’s undeniably good intentions, to often wind up reflecting the interests and views of the coordinator class “from above.”

On the plus side, Marxism brilliantly reveals that class differences can arise from differences in ownership relations. Capitalists own means of production. Workers own only their labor power which they sell for a wage. The capitalist pursues profit by trying to extract as much work as possible with the least expenditure possible. The worker tries to expand wages, improve conditions, and exert as little as possible. This is a class struggle within capitalism. And as far as it goes, this picture is certainly true as well as very widely known. So, what’s the problem? 

The problem is that Marxists additionally assert that only property relations generate class difference. Marxists rule out a priori that other economic relations can also divide actors into critically important classes with different circumstances, motives, and means I.

In capitalism, some waged employees monopolize empowering conditions and tasks and have considerable say over their own work and the work of other employees below. Some other waged employees endure only disempowering conditions and tasks and have virtually no say over their own or anyone else’s conditions. The former are empowered and try to maintain their monopoly on empowering circumstances and their higher wages. The latter are disempowered and seek to expand their wages, improve their conditions, and work as little as possible. This too is a class struggle under capitalism. 

Within capitalism, in this view, we have not only capitalists and workers, but, between labor and capital, in fact there is a “coordinator class” of empowered employees who defend their advantages against workers below and who struggle to enlarge their bargaining power and conditions against owners above. More, this coordinator class can seek to remove owners to itself become a new ruling class of a new economy that has capitalists removed but workers still subordinate. To recognize this is not rocket science not least because it has happened in real societies that have called themselves socialist. 

That is, and this is the flaw that I mean to highlight, Marxism’s two class view obscures and prevents even acknowledging the existence of a class which not only contends with capitalists above and with workers below, but which can become the ruling class of a new economy, properly called, I think, not socialist (which name would hide its ruling class), but coordinatorist (which name would reveal its ruling class).

Finally, this new economy, coordinatorism features public or state ownership of productive assets and a corporate division of labor. It puts decision making in the hands of a few. It remunerates for power and/or output. It utilizes central planning and/or markets for allocation. And its advocates call it market or centrally planned socialism. 

Virtually every Marxist text that offers a serious institutionally described economic vision celebrates it, in one guise or another, as the goal of Marxist struggle. Every Marxist party that has ever actually redefined a society’s economic relations has implemented it. Yet despite its familiarity, this system is barely conceptualized at all. It is Draper’s first type of socialism. He rejects it and so do I, but for me, it is not seriously socialistic and is better called coordinatorism.

Despite its other ample accomplishments, regarding visions of desirable economy, Classical Marxism, Orthodox Marxism, or the Marxism of Marxism Leninism is counter-productive in four ways. First, it raises a general taboo against “utopian” speculation. This tends to minimize attention to vision. Second, it tends to presume that if economic relations are made desirable other social relations will fall into place. This tends to minimize attention to cultural, kinship, and political vision. Third, its visionary watchword, “From each according to ability, to each according to need,” would in practice curtail needed information transfer and has in any event never been more than rhetorical for victorious Marxist parties. Their vocally preferred alternative has been at best “from each according to capacity, to each according to contribution to the social product” which is in any case not a morally worthy maxim because it would reward productivity, including genetic endowment and differential tools and conditions. And fourth, and most relevant to our discussion here, in practice such Marxists advocate a hierarchical division of labor in workplaces plus central planning or markets for allocation, each of which institutions propels coordinator class rule.

In other words, the heart of the problem that makes me question Marxism as a guide for proposing economic vision is that despite its great insights, due to its underlying concepts—and however innocently for most Marxist activists—Marxism’s economic goals most often feature a coordinator mode of production that elevates empowered employees to ruling status. This is why so many Marxists, even against their own desires, have all too often wound up, in Draper’s terms, advocates of strategy that operates “from above.” And it tells us one thing that Socialism, if we want that word to designate a worthy economy, can’t be.

Too often, that is, Marxism has been content, whether by omission or intention, to elevate to ruling status a class that is in capitalism above workers though below owners. Too often, Marxism has used the label “socialism,” which ought to imply people controlling their own economic lives, to label this coordinator class dominated goal. 

For these reasons, Marxism has not structurally implemented its most worthy ideals when it has gained power to affect societal outcomes, nor has it offered a well formulated vision that could do so. To label what it has achieved “socialism,” Marx himself would surely point out, is analogous to how bourgeois movements use the label “democratic” to rally support from diverse sectors for their political programs, though they never structurally implement truly democratic ideals.

Finally, what follows is that Leninism is a natural outgrowth of Marxism employed as it has been by people in capitalist societies, and while Leninism is certainly anti-capitalist, far from being the “theory and strategy for the working class,” Leninism is, instead, by virtue of its focus, concepts, values, organizational and tactical commitments, and by its institutional goals “the theory and strategy of the coordinator class.”

Leninism, again even against the aspirations of most or arguably even nearly all of its advocates, employs coordinator class organizational and decision making logic and structure to seek what turns out to be coordinator class economic outcomes. The “from above” tendencies that Draper rejects aren’t aberrations that crowd out better inclinations. They aren’t even just poor strategy or baggage from past society that infect emergent movements. The “from above” tendencies instead manifest coordinator class interests resident in certain defining Marxist concepts despite the reality that countless Marxists have not themselves personally favored such interests. There emerges an interesting analogy. Under capitalism, sincere and caring social democrats battle with owners not over the class roots of the owner’s wealth and power, as those are off limits, but over policies that seek to mitigate the most extreme pain that capitalist rule imposes. Similarly, under market and centrally planned coordinatorism, sincere and caring Marxist critics of its injustices battle with coordinators not over the class roots of the coordinator’s wealth and power, as those are conceptually off limits, but over policies that seek to mitigate the most extreme pain coordinator rule imposes.

So, what is “socialism” if we choose to use the term to convey our positive, worthy, viable, economic aims? One must at this point admit that even if all that is said above is true, it is generally not very effective to rail against a long standing intellectual framework by adopting a purely critical stance. Naysaying isn’t enough. Something positive must be offered. It seems to me this is where Draper fell short in his important pamphlet of the early 1960s. And for that reason, I would like to suggest that in place of the economic inadequacies of real life Marxism (though in tune with grass roots Marxists’ desires), to achieve greater relevance for current aspirations activists should utilize a richer conceptual framework emphasizing the broader social relations of production, including all the material, human, and social inputs and outputs of economic activity, the various social and psychological as well as material dimensions of class division, and particularly the impact of corporate divisions of labor and of market and centrally planned allocation on class hierarchy—not only in capitalism but also in coordinatorism.

If we do all that, in addition to of course retaining the many lasting insights of Marxism and for that matter of all prior revolutionary frameworks, I think the conclusion that will follow is that we need to reject existent and past market and centrally planned models of a better economy and gravitate instead toward new truly classless structures “from below.” 

For myself, having travelled along just that conceptual path with my friend and then writing partner Robin Hahnel, I most often call the new economic vision that all this reasoning leads toward “participatory economics.” It includes a commons of productive assets in place of private state ownership; councils for workplace and consumer self management in place of authoritarian decision-making; equitable remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued work  (and for need for those who can’t work) in place of remuneration for property, power, or even output; jobs balanced for empowerment effects in place of a corporate division of labor; and participatory planning in place of markets or central planning for allocation. 

That is the core vision I would like to append to Draper’s insights because that vision is, I believe, worthy, workable, and classless and should for those reasons replace what I call coordinatorism as the goal of movements seeking life after capitalism. And, for that matter, should also inform and augment social democracy’s near term aspirations. Developing a movement from below should not simply find fault with some past ways but instead positively favor:

• A Productive Commons (built and natural) to replace state ownership and top down control over means of production.

• Council self management that delivers to people influence over decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by those decisions, to replace coordinator-led authoritative rule.

• Remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor to replace remunerating for property, bargaining power, or output so as to eliminate exploitation.

• Jobs balanced for their empowerment effects to replace corporate divisions of labor so as to eliminate the workplace basis for coordinator rule.

• Participatory planning to replace markets and or central planning, so as to eliminate the allocational basis for coordinator rule.

Together these five features can propel solidarity, equity, diversity, and self-management rather than stifling and trampling each. 

It might be nice to claim that Leninists have mistakenly advocated a set of institutions that don’t, in fact, spring from the logic of their Marxist conceptual framework. This is Draper’s view. But while coordinatorism is not what most grass roots Marxists actually desire, it does spring naturally from various Marxist and particularly Leninist concepts and commitments, which is why these need to be transcended.

I note that Marx himself taught that we ought to look at ideologies or conceptual frameworks and ask of them, who do they serve? What are they suited for? What do they include? What do they exclude? And will their inclusions and exclusions make them suitable or unsuitable for our aims? Marx was no one’s fool and these are very insightful instructions. Applied to contemporary Marxism, however, which of course post dates Marx and leaves out many of his insights even while sometimes enriching and augmenting others, these instructions reveal that contemporary Marxism all too often leaves out and even explicitly obscures important economic relations the absence of which benefits the coordinator class in its agenda to overcome capitalism and install itself into ruling status. We shouldn’t only tinker with and otherwise refine “really-used” Marxism. It certainly has insights we should borrow, but as to its class analysis in particular—following Marx’s own advice we have to transcend that.

Now what about offering a little more detail of an economic vision that might propel, sustain, emerge from, and inform a “from below” movement such as Draper and most other grassroots Marxists desire? Can we spell out such a vision, a bit more?

First, briefly, why not retain capitalism, albeit guarding against its worst excesses? Capitalist economics revolves around private ownership of the means of production, market allocation, and corporate divisions of labor. Remuneration is for property, power, and to a limited extent contribution to output. Capitalism intrinsically causes huge differences in wealth and income. It produces divisions due to property ownership and also due to differential access to empowering versus disempowering work. It produces huge differences in decision-making influence and quality of resulting circumstances. Buyers and sellers one-up each other and the broader public reaps the harsh anti-sociality that self-interested competition sows. Perverse trajectories of profit-guided investment and compatible personality development result. Decision-making ignores or actively produces and exploits ecological decay. Unless compelled otherwise, the drive to accumulate ignores ecological impact. Reduced ecological diversity and even suicidal ecological distortions result. To transcend soul destroying capitalism and to escape its suicidal ecological trajectory, suppose we prefer along with a growing tide of modern citizens various common left core values that I think Draper himself would also certainly advocate: equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, ecological balance, participation, and internationalism. In that case, we would need to ask what economic institutions can propel these values as well as admirably accomplish essential economic functions of production, consumption, and allocation while not also producing offsetting negative outcomes?

To start, at the risk of a little repetition, we might choose to advocate public/social property relations in place of privatized capitalist property relations. In such a new system, all citizens would own every workplace in equal part. This ownership would convey no special right or income. Put differently, productive assets would constitute a productive commons. Elon Musk wouldn’t own a massive proportion of the means by which software, cars, rockets, and whatnot are produced. Jeff Bezos wouldn’t own a gigantic array of assets, warehouses, trucks, etc. No owners would amass profits, control productive assets, and exploit wage slaves because people would no longer own in such ways. We all would instead equally own society’s means of production—or, symmetrically, if you prefer, no one would own any of it. At any rate, ownership would become moot regarding distribution of income, wealth, and power. In this way the ills of private ownership such as personal accrual of profits that in turn yield huge wealth and private control over workplaces would disappear.

Next, we might organize workers and consumers into self managing councils with the norm for decisions being that methods of dispersing information to decision-makers and of their then arriving at preferences and tallying them into decisions should convey to each actor, to the extent possible, influence over each decision in proportion to the degree they will be affected by it. Such self-managed councils would be the seat of decision-making power and would exist at many levels, including subunits such as work groups and teams, and supra units such as workplaces and whole industries. And likewise on the consumption side, councils would operate for living units, neighborhoods, counties, states, or cantons, etc. People organized in councils would be the economy’s decision-makers. Votes, when necessary, could be by majority rule, three quarters, two-thirds, consensus, or whatever method councils would themselves choose to best approximate self management. Decisions would be taken at different levels, with fewer or more participants, depending on the particular implications of the decisions in question. For example, sometimes a team or individual would make a decision pretty much on its own, though in context of more encompassing choices taken at broader levels. Sometimes a whole workplace or whole industry would be the primary decision body. Different voting and tallying methods would be employed as needed for different decisions at different levels. There would be no a priori single correct choice. There would be, however, a right norm to try to efficiently and sensibly implement: decision-making input should be in proportion as one is affected by decisions. 

Next, we might alter the organization of work by changing who does what tasks in what combinations. Each actor would do a job, of course. Each job would involve a variety of tasks, of course. What would change from the almost universal current corporate division of labor to a preferred future socialist division of labor is to balance for empowerment implications the combination of tasks each actor does. Every person participating in creating new products is a worker. With “balanced job complexes,” the combination of tasks and responsibilities you have at work would accord to you the same empowerment as the combination I have would accord to me, and likewise for each other worker. A relative few people would not overwhelmingly monopolize empowering, fulfilling, and engaging tasks and circumstances. Relatively more people would not be overwhelmingly saddled with only rote, obedient, and dangerous things to do. For reasons of equity and especially to create the conditions of informed, confident participation and self-management by everyone, when we each participate in our workplace, industry, and consumer decision-making, we would each have been comparably prepared by our work with confidence, skills, and knowledge to do so. The typical situation we now have is that instead some people who produce have great confidence, social skills, decision-making skills, and relevant knowledge imbued by their daily work, while other people are only tired, de-skilled, and made to lack relevant decision making knowledge due to their daily work. Balanced job complexes would do away with this corporate division of circumstances. Balanced job complexes would complete the task of removing the root basis for class division that is begun by eliminating private ownership of capital. That is, balanced jobs would eliminate not only the role of owner and its centralization of power and wealth, but also the role of empowered decision maker who exists over and above other workers. Balanced job complexes would equitably apportion conceptual and empowering and also rote and disempowering responsibilities to foster true self management and classlessness.

Next comes remuneration. We work. This would entitle us to a share of the product of work. But this new vision says that we ought to receive for our socially valued labors an amount in tune with how hard we have worked, how long we have worked, and with whatever sacrifices we have endured at work. We wouldn’t get more by virtue of being more productive due to having better tools, more skills, or even greater inborn talent, much less by virtue of having more power or owning productive assets. We would be entitled to more consumption only by virtue of usefully expending more of our effort or otherwise enduring more sacrifice. This would be morally appropriate and would also provide proper incentives due to rewarding only what we can ourselves affect, not what we can’t. With balanced job complexes, for eight hours of normally paced work Sally and Sam would receive the same income. This is so if they have the same job, or any job at all. No matter what their particular job responsibilities might be, no matter what workplaces they are in, no matter how different their mix of tasks might be, and no matter how talented they may be, if they work at a balanced job complex, their total work load will be similar in its empowerment effects so the only difference specifically relevant to reward will be their length and intensity of working, and the onerousness of the conditions they endure. With all this equal, they will earn an equal share of output. If the length of time or the intensity their socially beneficially work or the onerousness of conditions they work under differs somewhat, so too would the share of output they earn. Who would mediate decisions about the definition of job complexes and about what rates and intensities people are working? Workers would, of course, in their councils, with appropriate decision-making say for each, and using information culled by methods consistent with employing balanced job complexes and awarding just remuneration.

A very large step remains, even to offer only a broad outline of the core features of a worthy economic vision. How are the actions of workers and consumers connected? How do decisions made in workplaces, and decisions made by collective consumer councils, as well as decisions made by individual consumers all come into accord? What causes the total produced by workplaces to match the total consumed collectively by neighborhoods and other groups and also privately by individuals? For that matter, what determines the relative social valuation of different products and choices? What decides how many workers will be in which industry producing how much? What determines whether some product should be made or not, and in what amounts? What determines what investments in new productive means and methods should be undertaken and which others should be delayed or rejected? These are all matters of allocation.

Existing options for dealing with allocation are central planning as was used in the old Soviet Union as well as inside large corporations—and markets as is used in all capitalist economies with minor or greater variations. In central planning a bureaucracy culls information, formulates instructions, sends these instructions to workers and consumers, gets some feedback, refines the instructions a bit, sends new instructions, and gets back obedience. In markets each actor in isolation from concerns for other actor’s well being competitively pursues its own agenda by buying and selling labor (or the ability to do it) and buying and selling products and resources at prices determined by competitive bidding. Each person seeks to gain more than other parties from their exchanges.

The problem is that each of these two modes of connecting actors and units imposes on the economy pressures that subvert the values and associated institutions we prefer. This is the same reasoning as was applied to other past structures to decide that we need replacements, including, for example, private ownership, top down decision making, exploitative remuneration, and corporate divisions of labor. Markets, even without private capitalization of property, distort valuations to favor private over public benefits while they also channel personalities in anti-social directions thereby diminishing and even destroying solidarity. Markets reward primarily power and not only effort and sacrifice. They divide economic actors into a class that is saddled with rote and obedient labor and another that enjoys empowering circumstances and determines economic outcomes, thereby also accruing most income. They isolate buyers and sellers as decision-makers who have little choice other than to competitively ignore the wider implications of their choices, including effects on the ecology. Central planning, in contrast to markets, is authoritarian. It denies self-management and produces the same class division and hierarchy as markets but built first around the distinction between planners and those who implement their plans, and then extending outward to incorporate empowered and dis-empowered workers more generally. Both these allocation systems subvert rather than propel the values we hold dear. But what is a worthy alternative to markets and central planning?

Suppose in place of top-down imposition of centrally planned choices and in place of competitive market exchange by atomized buyers and sellers, we could have cooperative, informed choices by organizationally and socially entwined actors each with a say in proportion as choices impact them, each able to access needed accurate information and valuations, and each having appropriate training and confidence to develop and communicate their preferences. That could foster council centered participatory self-management, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, proper valuations of collective and ecological impacts, and classlessness. 

To those ends, activists might favor participatory planning, a system in which worker and consumer councils propose their work activities and their consumer preferences in light of accurate knowledge of local and global implications and true valuations of the full social and ecological benefits and costs their choices will impose and garner. The proposed system could utilize a back and forth cooperative communication of mutually informed preferences via a variety of simple communicative and organizing principles and vehicles including indicative prices, facilitation boards, and rounds of accommodation to new information—all to permit actors to express, mediate, and refine their desires in light of feedback about other’s desires, so as to arrive at compatible choices consistent with equitable remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory self managing influence. Consistent with the well being and fulfillment of each actor being the condition for the fulfillment and development of all actors and vice versa. So, if in longer works we make a full case for its viability and virtues, would all that constitute a full picture of an economic alternative to capitalism? 

Of course not, it is way too brief. The above isn’t some kind of impossible comprehensive one type fits all blueprint. It is five core features essential to attain classlessness but is not remotely a map of all elements that would characterize new economies as decided on by their different populations for their many different aspects in different countries with different histories. It is only a vision for defining aspects of five core features a new classless economy would need to include so the practice and preferences of people could in turn determine a vast array of contextually contingent features that any such economy would choose to append to its scaffold of core features which, in sum, again, would be only five:

• A Productive Commons to remove pursuit of profit and control over work by private owners.

• Democratic workplace and consumer councils to use diverse decision-making procedures to provide proportionate say for those affected by decisions

• Balanced job complexes to provide a just distribution of empowering and dis-empowering circumstances

• Remuneration for effort and sacrifice to deliver equity in accord with morally efficient incentive logic

• Participatory planning to provide allocation that serves human well being and development

Together this view’s advocates claim that these five features constitute a core institutional scaffolding suitable for a systemic alternative to capitalism and also alternative to what has been called centrally planned or market socialism, but which is, in our terminology, centrally planned or market coordinatorism. And so, finally, what does all this say about our question, “what is socialism?”

I think Draper was right about his take on approaches “from below” or “from above,” but I think to successfully pursue his agenda sixty years after he proposed it requires that we clarify that the “from below” stance is one of strategy but also of vision and underlying concepts. More, the positive prescription is not just that we ought to prefer “from below” but that we should understand that to prefer “from below” means to develop movements that can overcome current oppressive obstacles in a manner that will “melt into” a new society that is economically truly classless and self managing as well as comparably liberated regarding other domains of social life, mainly but not only, kinship, culture, and polity.

I think that nowadays in my country the word “socialism” is used more frequently than in the past and is also less often ridiculed or hated than in the past because of the impact of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and most recently Zohran Mamdani on huge audiences along with the growing dangers of capitalist tendencies and the growing successes of DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Okay, but still, what does the word “socialism” tend to convey? For the tens of thousands and indeed millions who now say they align more with socialism than with capitalism, does that just mean they like good outcomes and positive aspirations, or does it also mean they favor an array of institutions that compose a system they want to put in place of capitalism? To the extent it is just the former, why is that? 

I have thought it is because pro-socialist proclamations and literature have rarely tried to clearly present new institutions. They have tended to either not describe new institutions at all or to describe them too obscurely for nearly anyone to wade through much less be moved by and then able to explain the proposals to others.  

I still think that is a very large part of the reason, but taken alone it seems an insufficient explanation. Why? This morning I woke up, checked my email, and in the mass of materials one missive immediately got my attention. It was a promotional mailing from Jacobin Magazine that offered a “socialist reading list.” I looked closer and the list offered three books that people could order. Two were by Bhaskar Sunkara—one that he edited and one that he wrote. I hadn’t read either one and I decided to take a look. I expected to encounter something more or less like what I encountered ages ago when I first read Michael Harrington’s book, Socialism. That is, a brilliant account of the ills of capitalism, some revealing history of socialist movements or parties, and a moving call for better things and perhaps even some indication of what’s necessary to win those better things, but not a description of new institutions.

Well, I was partially surprised. First, Sunkara’s efforts had no jargon and no convoluted passages. For those who read, which is sadly a steadily declining proportion of the population, Sunkara could be accessibly read. More, Sunkara addressed real things that people do say and think. He used familiar examples. He offered some quite clever but on point humor, and no obscurity.

The longer offering, titled The Socialist Manifesto, which is what I read first, had an initial very creative, down to earth, daily life argument against what we endure in capitalism and for generating vision and indications of how to transcend capitalism. Then followed a long historical part with impressive breadth and depth. And then there was a third part offering insights bearing on current conditions and ways to go forward. Beyond style points, and I would have to give a great many of those, Sunkara did in fact address current institutions and their ways of impacting people’s options and actions. I liked and found compelling much of what he said, though I admit, not all. But that is not the point here. More, the book was from quite a few years back, and some conditions have changed. Also not the point here, though he has another work coming out this month. But the fact is, I hadn’t previously read Sunkara’s work, so two new questions arose. 

First, why hadn’t I? And, second, why hadn’t his efforts and other efforts more or less like his had more impact on what a person who says “I favor socialism more than capitalism” would answer when asked, “okay, but what is socialism?” Sunkara’s ABCs of Socialism, a collection, had similar virtues. Written very accessibly, it experimented with different daily life rooted ways of presenting its material. But neither book described core institutions. 

I suspect the reason for my having not read Sunkara’s works before may in part be because I didn’t see much notice about the books among “intellectuals” and economists and that led me to assume it was nothing new or different. That seems like it might explain it. Or maybe there was more to my not reading it. I honestly don’t know. But then comes another question. Why didn’t these books get more notice? Jacobin admirably pushed them into view and is still, years later, doing so. That is good. Even exemplary. Of course, mainstream media did not promote them. But that’s our current world. We get that. 

Another question rises. Why didn’t literally all alternative media review and debate these books, as well as others also serious, about addressing what we want and how to get it? Why isn’t collective attention to vision and strategy across progressive venues a persistent priority? Why didn’t these books, for example, reach further into the public, at least the “capitalism dismissing and socialist leaning” public and thereby cause more such people to have coherent answers when asked what institutional changes would bring into existence the wonderful things they want? And to also have coherent answers for why what they now favor wouldn’t generate the horrific outcomes so-called socialist revolutions have delivered in the past? 

The Socialist Manifesto and ABCs or Socialism are admirably more accessible than most other such works but they too present socialism as movements, as history, as desires, but not also as a set of institutions that would generate wonderful and not horrific outcomes. Why is that?

Is my concern about the word “socialism” just that presentations that have sought to advance “socialism” have not in fact gotten across? Is it that presentations that try to advance socialist vision and that have offered institutional proposals and arguments, have been too obscure and too divorced from the experiences, desires, and fears of working people’s daily lives? Or is it—and this is ultimately my concern—that today’s populations are overwhelmingly disinclined to even look at such works much less give them serious attention so as to gain and spread insights from them? Is it that their merit is never even assessed, and only tangentially even noticed?

Whatever obstacles are at play, they apply pretty equally to pretty much any positive alternative vision, including participatory economics which is sometimes called participatory socialism—as well as to participatory society—and to every other vision for economics or for other parts of society. 

In short, are socialists and really everyone who has offered economic or social vision just doing a poor job of communicating their thoughts for one reason or another? What we offer doesn’t resonate. Or is it that regardless of how good a job anyone might do, the public, even the progressive public, resists reading about any vision? Such writing doesn’t get assessed much less debated, refined, augmented, and spread. Are people just not interested or even actively dismissive, even on the left? And if that is the case, why? 

One thing is certain. It is not because everyone likes what we now endure much less the growing risks regarding coming years. It could be that those of us trying to expand commitment to vision haven’t found an effective way to convey our proposals, and I actually hope that is the answer because then once we find better ways, we will do better. 

Even just in the U.S. at least tens of millions do not like what we suffer. Tens of millions even hate what we suffer. So why don’t tens of millions pay attention to alternatives? Setting aside promotion problems, why is there vastly more inclination to write and read even self help nonsense (or redundant nay-saying) than to write and read serious vision and strategy? It may be because most people are convinced nothing better is possible, nothing better can be attained, or nothing better would last. People may feel that to read about something fundamentally better and how to attain it is a waste of time. Pie in the sky nonsense. There is nothing better, period.

I know our immersion in social media, the corruption of much culture, our lacking any memory or operational conception of collective action, our rampant individualism, our simmering and even currently escalating fears, and especially our cynicism based on lies and confusions all play a role.

That is all understandable and it is no sin. But whatever obstacles impede people hungering for and devouring and then assessing, refining, and finally most importantly augmenting and utilizing works of vision and strategy—all to gain shared clarity about the actual institutional substance we want, why it would work as we say, how it should inform our current activism, why it would deliver the goods we seek, and how our actions can lead toward it instead of leading in circles or even toward still more abominable relations—to overcome the obstacles is an essential step to amassing growing support to not only reduce the horrors around us, but to finally eliminate their causes and attain new institutions that promote better. 

Whatever obstacles interfere with people arriving at really widespread shared visionary and strategic clarity, we have to overcome them. We want new economy, new polity, new kinship, new culture and community, new ecology, new international relations. We have to find ways to envision viable lasting institutions for all that and, more so, we have to communicate effectively about those desired institutions and about the strategies they entail. 

Whatever the obstacles to our doing all that are, to overcome them ought to be a priority task. Being right about what’s wrong and even about what would be better matters, but it is the easy part. The hard part is effective communication and effective activism. To communicate and act effectively needs more attention.

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